"It came straight out of the depths and got him!" says witness…
Just last weekend, a surfer in Northern California was dive-bombed by a Great White. It ain’t no big deal in those parts. It’s as much a part of surfing as sunburn and fin-chops from thrown away SUPs are on Australia’s Gold Coast.
And, as the writer Lewis Samuels told BeachGrit, surfers there take comfort in the fact that great whites in northern California are different to the more energetic South African and Australian breed. In that, they have a different hunting pattern. They might bite but they’ll let go after the initial bleed and wait for you to bleed out instead of taking you down straight away.
And it’s exactly what happened last Sunday! The surfer, 50-year-old Kevin Swanson, was surfing Sand Spit at Montana de Oro State Park near Morro Bay when a Great White had a swing, a bite, and split.
The surfer, reportedly some kind of commando, applied his own tourniquet while paddling for shore and, on the beach, his surf pal, New Zealander Andrew Walsh, calmly recounted the attack.
Such calm after the ambush of a magnificent prehistoric animal! Click!